From Dessalines to Duvalierby David Nicholls
1996

Reviewed by Bob Corbett, 10 February 1996

1996 is shaping up to be a good year for those of us who want to read
or teach Haitian history. For readers of English there hasn't been a
thorough history in print for several years. Just the other day
Michael Heinl sent us the information about the reissue of his
parents' history: WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Today I'm here to announce the
reissue of David Nicholls' wonderful history: FROM DESSALINES TO
DUVALIER: RACE, COLOUR AND NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE IN HAITI. The basic
data is:

The old and the new versions LOOK the same. Both have a blue cover
with some red stripes and a bright color plate. But the plates are
different. The original cover ...based on a painting by Aubrey
Williams... The new volume carries a painting of Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, Le Nouveau Familier by Edouard Duval Carrie.

Also the original volume did not carry the subtitle on the cover as
the new edition does.

The main text of the two volumes is identical, however the new edition
has a 28 page new preface. I was very happy to see that Nicholls
chose to use a preface as an update, and not to tack it on as a new
chapter. This for two reasons, one the preface is in a different
style than the book, being shorter less sustained treatment of
relatively discreet themes—topics that deal with the fall of the
Duvaliers, the interim government, the place of religion in the
new Haiti and so on. These brief updates are lucid, accurate
and very useful.

The main reason I prefer the new material in the preface, however, is
that the book is a very careful and sustained argument, a unified view
of Haitian history up to the late 1970s. For an addition to fit it
would have taken a much longer and careful section which would have
integrated the new material with the theme of the book.

The 1979 book is a major contribution to the study of Haiti. Rather
than review it anew, I am simply going to present a review of the
original volume which I wrote several years ago. I apologize to those
of you who have already seen the older review, which I posted just a
few months ago, but perhaps, now that the book is once again available
in print, it will be of more interest now than it was then.

Secondly, the review is part of a two-book review, and since the
review does some comparative analysis, I will leave the old review
intact as it was.

The old review is from 1988.

From Dessalies to Duvalier, by David Nicholls
Macmillan Publishers Inc. 1988 (paper)

and

Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race and Underdevelopment
since 1700 by Alex Dupuy
Westview Press 1989 (hard back)

The events of Haitian history are fairly clear and non-controversial.
Some of them are extraordinary, such as the overthrow of the French
slave system and defeat of some 80,000 well-armed French troops by a
slave army. Other events are less encouraging, such as the steady
stream of authoritarian and repressive regimes since the liberty
of 1804.

What is controversial in Haitian history are causes. Why and how did
these events occur? Did Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe and Rigaud
with their slave army defeat the French, or did yellow fever? Is
Haitian underdevelopment rooted in the Haitian treatment of Haitians,
or in the imperialism of the United States, France and Britain?

These are difficult questions and the literature of Haitian history is
filled with debates about them, especially in French. However, few
books available in English contribute more positively to understanding
Haitian history and the controversies of this history than the two
books under review.

David Nicholls' fine history was first published in 1979. Macmillan
recently published the paperback in 1988. It is a carefully
documented history of Haiti from the revolutionary period (1791-1804),
through Papa Doc Duvalier's years (1957-1971). He focuses on the
question of race and class and argues that a particular sort of racial
question is dominant over class interests in determining Haiti's
history.

Nicholls' view is that race is closely related to culture in Haiti.
The mulattos, in order to set themselves apart from the slaves turned
to France for their identity and culture. While this caused mulattos
to emphasize whiteness, more importantly it caused them to emphasize
Europeaness.

The blacks, however, most of whom were freed from slavery via the
revolutionary struggle, hated the French and the whiteness they
associated with the French. Since the mulattos were united with the
white French, the blacks opposed, even hated the mulattos.

Again, however, Nicholls returns to the theme of culture. In this
black rejection of whiteness what the blacks rejected was western
culture.

Thus the ultimate battle lines of Haitian history were cultural
issues. Nicholls does not deny the place of color and class, but
argues this cultural racism (the mix of color and culture) is the
dominant causal element in Haitian history.

Thus we have:

mulattos

blacks

Catholic religion

Voodoo religion

French language

Haitian (Creole) language

French/Western customs

African customs

Plantation system (proprietors)

Subsistence farming

One of the fascinating subtheses of his work is that any view of
Haitian history one hears has already been shaped by whichever
color/cultural world the historian comes from. A significant and
extremely informative section of Nicholls' book is an analysis of
Haitian history according to the standard mulatto view, then the same
history from the standard black view. (E.g., was the black Toussaint
or the mulatto Rigaud the real hero of the revolution?) Nicholls
analyzes the major historians of both color/cultures to see how they
deviate from the idealized pattern he describes of each color/cultural
group.

This is a great way to read history. He tells us the same story from
many points of view and criticizes the strengths and weaknesses of
each view.

There is an odd curiosity to Nicholls' approach to Haiti. In the
early history--the revolution of 1791-1804 and the early years of
Haitian independence--until about 1848, Nicholls analyzes the EVENTS
of Haitian history, trying to lay bare the causes.

From that point on Nicholls assumes that the events are shaped by the
intellectuals who formulated history and ideology. Thus, rather than
doing the same sort of causal analysis of historical events that he
did early on, he assumes the causes of Haiti's history lie in these
intellectual and ideological battles, and he shows us how the events
developed from the writings of such people as Thomas Madiou, J.C.
Dorsinville, Jean Price-Mars, Les Griots. This latter section of his
book is a tour-de-force of scholarship.

Alex Dupuy writes a very different, but equally fascinating book. He
focuses on the same period of Haitian history, with an earlier start
in colonial Saint-Domingue (French Haiti), and not ending until the
fall of Leslie Manigat in 1988.

Dupuy's focus is not on general Haitian history, but on the nature of
Haitian economy. His primary concern is to explain the causes of
Haitian underdevelopment.

In particular Dupuy rejects the view that overpopulation is in any way
a significant cause of Haiti's misery. Rather, he sees several
important causes which correspond to various periods of Haitian
history.

During the French colonial period the major problem was France,
especially the maritime bourgeoisie. What they wanted from
Saint-Domingue was two-fold:

France prohibited the colony from developing manufacturing since the
French bourgeoisie wanted that for themselves in France.

Meanwhile in the colony itself the slave owning planters resisted any
labor saving technologies. They had cheap labor from the slaves, and
any decrease in their labor intense lives could have provided a
dangerous idleness.

Given that the overwhelming mass of people in the colony were unpaid
slaves, no serious internal market developed.

All of these factors combined to create a highly dependent and
underdeveloped economy which independent Haiti inherited in 1804.

From 1804 until 1843 the early Haitian rulers continued this
underdevelopment. There were no longer official slaves, but
Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe and Boyer all tried to re-introduce
the plantation system, but failed to get the former slaves to return
to the plantations.

Rather, the newly freed Haitians retreated to subsistence farming and
small-plot coffee exporting. This weak internal economy enforced the
underdevelopment. The primary problem was the lack of any integrated
economy, that is, producing raw materials or agricultural products
which fed into manufacturing, which, in turn, returned goods to the
local market. Instead Haiti had small local food markets, raw coffee
exports, and relied on the importation of all manufactured goods and
many foodstuffs.

Because of this import-centered economy, the international community
earned more profits from Haiti than Haitians, even the rich ones. It
marketed expensive manufactured goods in Haiti, and added the
lucrative processing to Haitian coffee and other export crops.

The Haitian power elite retreated to the periphery of the economy and
jockied for governmental power in order to expropriate whatever
profits they could from the mechanisms of the state (taxation,
import/export levies) and the graft that came with government offices,
especially the presidency.

A new phase came to Haiti with the American occupation (1915-1934).
The occupation was the culmination of foreign capital's penetration of
Haiti. The Americans forced the Haitians to give up their 1804
insistence that only Haitians could own land. This allowed American
interests to purchase land and more fully control Haiti. The
occupation also marked the end of any significant international
competition to the United States. The Americans effectively drove all
other countries out of Haiti.

Perhaps the most startling claim in Dupuy's analysis of the 20th
century is the ironic thesis that the American occupation set the
conditions for the origins of Duvalierism and hammered the final nails
in Haiti's casket of underdevelopment. The Americans decided to build
up the middle class to break the stronghold on the country which the
Haitian elite held, especially the mulattos. This itself was ironic
since the Haitians already existed on the periphery of their own
economy, and the Americans were working hard to insure deeper American
penetration. Haiti was a market for American goods, and a cheap
source of food stuffs.

The Americans did succeed in building a middle class of
professionals--doctors, lawyers, teachers, and government bureaucrats.
However, this rising class, which was almost entirely black, had a
long hard struggle to carve out a place in Haitian economy. The
ideology which it developed was a noirist one--a celebration of things
black and African-- to offset the power sources which blocked them
in--the white Americans and the dominant Haitian mulatto elite. (Note
how well Dupuy's analysis dove-tails with Nicholls'!)

The ultimate outcome of this movement was the presidency and 29 year
dictatorship of the Duvalier family. What Francois, Papa Doc,
Duvalier brought to Haiti, on Dupuy's view, was not a change in the
structure of Haiti's economy, nor even a change in the violence of
government, but a shake-up of who controlled the government.
Duvalier, for the first time in Haitian history, elevated to power a
black non-elite middle class. He built up the fragile roots of
existing black ascendancy--the rural Voodoo priests, rural sheriffs
and justices of the peace, and junior black military officers. The
external violence of his struggle, probably the most blatant use of
force in Haitian history, did change the power relations and who
controlled the government and the right to expropriate wealth. But,
it also further devastated the economy, destroying tourism, driving
out foreign investors and disrupting rural production.

One of the strongest features of both books is that each author
presents his own case with clear crisp arguments, but names and
identifies the sources of opposing views. I came away from these
books not necessarily convinced by either author's view, but enriched
in my understanding of the possibilities and armed with dozens of
sources which are now on my MUST READ list.

It is a sad fact that many excellent books on Haiti don't stay in
print very long. Both Nicholls and Dupuy's fine books are still
available. [the above claim was in 1988 or 1989. I doubt this is
true today.] For any serious student of Haiti these works are
excellent investments in your growth in understanding the complexity
of Haiti's current reality through a deeper grasp of her tortured
history.